Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 05 October
6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
About
Join two highly celebrated poets and thinkers, Claudia Rankine and Evelyn Araluen, as they hold a rigorous and collaborative live conversation that expands on their co-written essay “Poetic Solidarities” from The Big Anxiety: Taking Care of Mental Health in Time of Crisis.
This is a thrilling opportunity to witness a deeply-considered and far-reaching discussion of the potential of poetry for political resistance. Through the shared lens of their work as poets and academics, Rankine and Araluen will consider the ways Western psychiatry and conceptions of mental health can enable institutional racism, colonialism, and operate as extensions of oppressive structures like the medical and industrial prison complex.
Claudia Rankine will join Evelyn Araluen and the audience via live cross.
Presented in partnership with RMIT Culture and UNSW as part of The Big Anxiety
The Big Anxiety
The Big Anxiety festival is the largest mental health and arts festival in the world, and promotes mental health and wellbeing through exciting arts projects that combine science and creativity. The 2022 festival will be held in October in Melbourne.
Featuring
Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honours, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine will join the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
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Evelyn Araluen
Evelyn Araluen is a Goorie and Koori poet, researcher, and co-editor of Overland Literary Journal.